‘This is how I die’: Tour guide Kelsey Waghorn describes being engulfed by Whakaari/White Island eruption
As Whakaari/White Island exploded around tour guide Kelsey Waghorn, a book she had read three years earlier flashed through her mind.
Waghorn is among the 25 people who were seriously injured but survived the December 9 eruption in 2019.
Twenty-two others, including 20 tourists and two tour guides, lost their lives when what was meant to be a special trip to the tourist destination off the Bay of Plenty coastline turned to disaster.
The death toll was high because there was a pyroclastic surge – a fast-moving and ferociously hot mix of gases, ash and other material – that blanketed the island and everyone on it.
When the eruption began, Waghorn, then 25, thought back to the book Surviving Galeras, a first-hand account by volcanologist Stanley Williams, who survived an eruption in Colombia that killed six colleagues and three tourists in 1993.
In it, Williams wrote about being caught in a pyroclastic surge and how material caught up in one can travel “faster than bullets”.
He also shared the things he did that saved his life: the importance of finding a barrier and taking shelter, covering your airways, and never trying to outrun the surge.
She put his advice into action and urged the passengers she was guiding around the erupting island to do the same.
In an interview before next week’s release of her book Surviving White Island, Waghorn told the Herald how she later tracked down Williams and wrote to tell him how his account had helped save multiple lives.
“I said, ‘I read your book in 2016, and in 2019 I found myself in a similar situation ... and the words from your book popped up in my head... basically saving my life and the lives of my group.’
“I said, ‘I just wanted to say thank you for putting your experience into words because it saved my life.’”
Williams, who suffered burns, a brain injury, broken legs and a fractured spine in the 1993 eruption, wrote back.
Waghorn describes a “beautiful message”, saying he was amazed his book had contributed to saving lives.
She said the title of her book was an “ode” to Williams’ “because it’s one of the reasons why I’m here”.
‘Wow ... Look at that’: The moment when scenic trip turned to disaster
Waghorn hadn’t intended to be on Whakaari/White Island the day it erupted.
She was supposed to be taking time off to allow a minor injury to recover.
But she reported for work at White Island Tours, for which she’d been working for five years, after being asked to help with excursions for passengers on the cruise ship Ovation of the Seas.
In the weeks leading up to the eruption, GeoNet had upgraded the volcanic alert for the island to Level 2, indicating there was “moderate to heightened volcanic unrest”.
In Surviving White Island, Waghorn writes she “wasn’t overly concerned” by the alert upgrade.
“Level 2 didn’t always mean an eruption was imminent. Level 1 didn’t always mean that an eruption wasn’t imminent.”
The tour she was guiding that day was shorter than usual because of the cruise ship’s schedule.
Waghorn, who lost friends and co-workers Hayden Marshall-Inman and Tipene Maangi in the tragedy, said that, when her group visited the main crater, “everything was as normal as ever. It looked fine – steamy, but fine”.
Then, after walking back towards Crater Bay, the lives of everyone on the island changed forever.
“I heard someone say, ‘Wow’. And someone else exclaimed, ‘Look at that!’
“Then my radio started screaming. I had my back to the crater. I turned around. The moment I saw it, I knew what was happening. The island was erupting.”
‘Beautiful and awful. And silent’
Waghorn tells in Surviving White Island how the next two minutes slowed down.
An “enormous black and grey plume” rose rapidly over the island, soaring higher than its 321m peak.
“It was beautiful, actually, set against the bright blue sky,” she writes. “Beautiful and awful. And silent.
“There was no sonic boom. No earth-rumbling heads-up. The only noise now was the radios blaring something along the lines of ‘Eruption! Take cover!” She yelled, “Everyone with me! Run!”
As tourists and guides tried to take shelter behind mounds of rocks, Waghorn watched as the “worst-case scenario” took shape before her eyes.
Pyroclastic surges can travel at speeds above 700km/h. The heat from the emissions was up to 400C.
Williams’ words echoed in her mind: “Seek shelter, cover yourself, hold your breath.”
“Fear filled my body as soon as I saw that ashen cloud barrelling down the island,” she writes. “I knew our odds of survival were basically zero.”
She put on her gas mask and a pair of sunglasses, thinking there was “minimal” hope of living.
“Hyperventilating. My body and brain knew what was coming. This is how I die.”
Nearby, she could hear people screaming as “their – our – skin began to burn. It felt like being in an oven, and the temperature just kept rising. My exposed arms started to feel like they were on fire.”
For about 90 seconds, the surge spewed deadly material over the island.
Then, she recalls, “everything went still. Everything went quiet.
“Even the screams from the passengers were now reduced to whimpers and quiet crying.”
The island was covered in a dull green-grey ash.
People were covered in the ash. She looked at her arms and hands and could see that the burning sensation she had been feeling was her skin starting to melt.
Trying to get everyone to safety, she told her tourists, “No one is coming for you. You need to get up.”
It was a comment that – in terms of an official rescue effort – turned out to be true. It was private helicopter pilots who flew the critically injured patients off the island.
“I told them to follow me. We need to get back to the boat. We need to get off this f***ing island.”
She and others made it back to the jetty and were taken out to White Island Tours’ boats.
‘We had survived the unsurvivable’
The boats headed back to the mainland, where an assortment of emergency vehicles were setting up base at Whakatāne wharf.
As the boat carrying Waghorn and her group was halfway back to Whakatāne, a Coastguard vessel dropped two paramedics on board to treat the injured.
“You can only imagine the looks on their faces when they realised what they were ... dealing with: about 20 severely burnt people requiring urgent medical attention for burns, with nowhere near the right gear to care for them.”
Despite her burns, Waghorn didn’t think she was at risk of losing her life. But like others who survived the initial eruption, she was soon to learn that the nature of the internal and external burns created by gases and ash can be deadly.
‘Between total chaos and black nothingness’
She recalls arriving back at Whakatāne wharf, and being taken to hospital by ambulance.
“Everything starts to get a bit hazy from here. Like one of those horror films that cut in and out between total chaos and black nothingness,” she writes.
She remembers telling medical staff at Whakatāne Hospital that she didn’t want her family to see her “until you get my pain under control”.
She doesn’t remember her limbs being wrapped in plastic, nor being flown to Hutt Hospital, nor being put on a ventilator in intensive care as her condition plummeted.
The section of Surviving White Island in which she fights for her life is told via private messages between her family members, their journal entries, and accounts from some of the nurses who cared for her.
It makes for emotional reading, with those closest to Waghorn writing about their love and hope for the young guide, her bravery and their fears.
Talking to the Herald, Waghorn said that, when she first read those intensely private conversations, it wasn’t hard on her emotionally. “I know how it ends, right? I survive, it’s fine.”
What struck her hardest was reading Hayden Marshall-Inman’s name in the acknowledgements for the audiobook version.
“Even thinking about it makes me tear up,” she said.
“I saw Hayden’s name down the page, I burst into tears, and the sound tech guy’s like, ‘Do you want to stop?’ and I was like, ‘No, if I stop, I’m never going to get going again ... keep recording, you’re just going to have to stitch it together somehow.’”
The emotional audiobook recording process took four days.
On December 19, 10 days after the eruption, Waghorn was moved from Hutt Hospital’s ICU to the plastic and burns unit.
A journal post that day, written by her mother, Shelley, reads: “It was sad for all of us saying goodbye to the wonderful team in ICU. They saved your life, sweetheart. For that, we will be forever grateful.”
Waghorn remembers waking and wondering why some of her normally reserved family members were “very gushy”. She struggled to understand why they were being “overly affectionate”.
“I didn’t know that I’d come that close to not making it. I didn’t realise at the time that people hadn’t made it.
“I’m lying in bed like, ‘What is wrong with you guys? You guys are so intense.’”
By January 11, she was able to do a lap of her ward on a walking frame. Seven days later, she walked unaided.
She was transferred to Waikato Hospital on January 28, and allowed to visit Whakatāne for a couple of days.
As the family drove along the Bay of Plenty coastline, Whakaari/White Island came into view. Waghorn recalls saying out loud: “There’s the b***h.”
She told the Herald the comment was “tongue in cheek”; she has no animosity towards the island.
“It’s a live volcano, it did what live volcanoes do.
“I’ve sat on the beach multiple times, and I’ve been walking my dog, watching it erupt, since then and felt nothing, like it’s fascinating to watch ... it’s very interesting to watch.”
‘You don’t want to be here when that happens’
In the book, Waghorn says the favourite part of her job with White Island Tours was being on the boat.
She had learned the “bare minimum” about the island itself. If tourists asked her questions she couldn’t answer, she would later seek the information for next time.
The voyage from Whakatāne to Whakaari/White Island took about 90 minutes by boat. Before leaving, the crew would check the monitor cameras and sensors recording volcanic activity.
On calm days, the ride out would see passengers “lounge and chat and have a splendid sunbathing cruise that no one wanted to end”.
When the seas were rough, though, it would provide “white-knuckle days”.
Hard hats and gas masks would be handed out about 9km before embarking on Whakaari/White Island.
There was always a risk associated with visiting an active volcano, she writes.
“But in my mind, it was a bit like driving to work every morning.
“You know that, if you get in your car, you’re putting yourself at risk of being in an accident, but you still get in the car. Or on the bike. Or on the plane.
“Knowing you’re at risk and actually believing an accident will happen are two different things. Everyone has their own level of ‘acceptable risk’, and if you thought about all the ways you could get hurt, you’d never leave your home.”
Waghorn still says the island possessed “amazing sights” that “never seemed to get old”.
She’d tell the tourists, “This volcano can throw balls of magma at you, and you’re not going to be able to just step aside and watch them go past. You don’t want to be here when that happens.”
‘Life gets infinitely better, if you keep trying’
Waghorn says she hopes her book will help encourage others not to give up in the face of adversity.
“Through this book, I want to show you one important thing: life gets infinitely better, if you keep trying.”
She told the Herald she hoped the book would be looked on as a “story of hope”.
“People go through horrible s*** all the time. There’s always someone who’s going through something horrific, and if they can get through their thing, you can also get through your thing one way or the other.”
She is very much a straight shooter. Talking to her, it is also impossible to miss her sharp sense of humour.
Both attributes shine through when she is asked about the biggest thing she had learnt about herself while working on the book.
“There’s a quote ... I’ve got it saved on my phone because my family says it all the time.
“The thing that gets quoted a lot in my family, it’s from Yellowstone, from Beth Dutton. It goes, ‘Worry not, Daddy, only the good die young. If a meteor strikes Earth tonight, it’s me and the cockroaches running this motherf**** tomorrow.’
“So that’s the kind of quote that’s in my family, that I am a cockroach.”
Surviving White Island, by Kelsey Waghorn, is published by HarperCollins on February 24 with an RRP of $39.99.
Neil Reid is a Napier-based senior reporter who covers general news, features and sport. He joined the Herald in 2014 and has 34 years of newsroom experience. He has covered the Whakaari/White Island tragedy, and its ongoing impacts, at length.
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